In
sterner mood, when Love's hand held a scourge, I craved rather the
stress of the moorland with its bleaker mind imperative of
sacrifice. To rest again under the lee of Rippon Tor swept by the
strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-
shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink
round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished,
and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and
naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes
seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.
With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man
was no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the
piping god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which
Pan too has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew; and read
pantheism into Christianity when they set these words round
Ezekiel's living creatures in the altar vault of St Mark's:-
QUAEQUE SUB OBSCURIS DE CRISTO DICTA FIGURIS HIS APERIRE DATUR ET
IN HIS, DEUS IPSE NOTATUR.
"Thou shalt have none other gods but me." If man had been able to
keep this one commandment perfectly the other nine would never have
been written; instead he has comprehensively disregarded it, and
perhaps never more than now in the twentieth century. Ah, well!
this world, in spite of all its sinning, is still the Garden of
Eden where the Lord walked with man, not in the cool of evening,
but in the heat and stress of the immediate working day.
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